April 5, 2017

The Gathering Place is somewhere at-risk and low-income individuals can come to take a shower, do laundry or get deloused. There are cheap meals, a library and activities.

And from November 1 to March 31 it offers one of the city’s extreme-weather shelters. Well, March 31 has passed, but the winter weather hadn’t when Swanson met with Postmedia News three days earlier.

“They close the end of March even though those people still need (shelter),” the 74-year-old homeless activist said. “And the homeless count takes place a couple weeks before, so it seems like more people are sheltered than are (counted).”

She asked people at the Gathering Place where they would now go at night.

“They’d say, ‘I don’t know, I don’t know,’ over and over. They all have health issues, it’s just horrible.”